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With the rapidly-growing demand for technologies that solve challenges for healthcare patients, professionals and institutions, many of the most innovative and disruptive solutions are coming not from large corporations, but small, scrappy startup companies.

With this trend has risen a group of startup “incubators” and “accelerators” specifically focused on healthcare technology entrepreneurs. These organizations serve as a launching pad for healthtech startups by facilitating high-value mentoring, collaboration and investor connections, plus basic needs like office infrastructure and seed funding.

For the startups, this gives them the time and resources to refine their technologies and services while finding investors and customers. Meanwhile the accelerators benefit by building local economies, solving healthcare challenges, and opening up highly-profitable opportunities for their backing investors

Below, we’ll introduce you to some of the leading incubators in the healthcare industry. These incubators have a proven track record in helping innovative young companies bring new ideas and services to consumers and businesses.

The Top-Six Healthcare Incubators and Accellerators

Rock Health – Rock Health invites early stage companies to work within the incubator and receive funding and mentorship from a variety of companies and health organizations. Rock Health notes that 18% of our economy is healthcare-based, but it’s one of the last industries to receive a tech makeover. With more than 50 active startups in its portfolio, Rock Health is one of the most experienced healthcare incubators, especially for startups that focus on providing web services, mobile applications and SaaS solutions for healthcare providers and companies.

Health Wildcatters – Health Wildcatters is a mentorship-driven healthcare seed accelerator in Dallas; slightly different than an incubator. Though similar to incubators in their goals, accelerators typically acquire a small amount of equity in a startup, then work quickly to help a company achieve a short-term goal like raising money or launching a product. While incubators house companies for months or years, accelerators like Health Wildcatters work in weeks. Health Wildcatters focuses mainly on early-stage healthcare technology startups, including IT, SaaS, digital health and mobile health companies. Companies receive an initial seed investment and a 12-week program in which Health Wildcatters works quickly to help the company build value and refine its product. The name “wildcatter” hearkens back to independent oil entrepreneurs who were willing to take risks in where they drilled. Health Wildcatters takes the same approach to finding companies. This entrepreneurial approach allows it to help more startups reach their goals.

StartUp Health –Chaired by TimeWarner CEO Jerry Levin, this incubator aims to fund 1,000 healthcare companies within the next decade to help transform the face of the healthcare industry. StartUp Health works to build sustainable growth in its companies over a three-year period. During the incubation period, StartUp Health matches companies with a network of more than 10,000 health professionals and business people focused on improving digital health and wellness.

The Iron Yard – With its first location in Asheville, NC, the Iron Yard is growing a network of incubators focused on growing new areas of technology like digital health, green tech and emerging technologies. Itsdigital health accelerator, located in Spartanburg, SC, is working to turn one of the nation’s oldest railroad junctions into a hub for digital health innovation. The Iron Yard offers startups $20,000 in seed capital and three months of mentorship and workshops from experts in design, development and financing. The Iron Yard also offers training in web development and programming to place graduates with the startup companies it supports.

Blueprint Health – Blueprint Health, located in New York City, is one of the largest incubators in any niche and offers an expansive network of healthcare mentors to assist healthcare entrepreneurs launch new ventures. Blueprint Health focuses on companies developing tech projects directly for hospitals, physicians and health plans rather than consumer-facing applications, which means deeper access to established customers. In 2013, Blueprint Health focused its efforts on mature startups companies. While many incubators assist early-stage companies, more than half of Blueprint’s mentees already had paying customers. With more than 12,000 sq. ft. of space and two classes per year, Blueprint Health is able to help more than 100 healthcare companies each year.

Healthbox –Healthbox offers accelerator programs in Boston, Chicago, Tampa, London, Nashville and Salt Lake City that provide digital health entrepreneurs with funding and access to a global network of healthcare investors and providers. Healthbox launched its first accelerator program in Chicago in 2012 and quickly grew to other states and the UK. It recently expanded its business programs with $7 million in funding and started a program that helps hospitals create their own in-house Healthbox accelerator programs that, in turn, help companies gain traction within their own medical communities. So far, Healthbox has invested in 56 active startups, supported by a network of more than 350 expert mentors.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Anyone that is part of the healthcare IT and EMR world has to realize that we’re in a really incredible time for healthcare IT and EMR. There’s has never been more energy, excitement and actual investment in the Healthcare IT world than there is now. If you don’t believe me, buy your ticket to Las Vegas and attend HIMSS 2012 and I’m sure you’ll see what I mean. I have a feeling that HIMSS Las Vegas is going to be bigger than ever with more money flowing as well.

One other thing that is easy to underestimate is the value that the US government is putting on supporting healthcare innovation through entrepreneurship. Normally I’m as skeptical as anyone in putting any sort of faith in government to produce results. I still think they have their hands tied in a lot of things, but I give a lot of credit to Aneesh Chopra, Todd Park and Farzad Mostashari for doing their very best to kick against the challenges of big government while enabling health entrepreneurs to be successful.

Priya Ramachandran wrote about an example of one initiative the government is putting forward to help entrepreneurs: Access to Public Health Data. Every time I hear someone talk about the data that’s available from these public repositories of health data, the entrepreneur inside of me kicks in with ideas on how to use that data for good.

It is a really tremendous time to be an entrepreneur in healthcare. I do think we still need a better platform for health IT startups to launch their products and get funding. I have a few ideas I’m working on in this regard. More on this in the future.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I hope everyone has started to enjoy their holidays. I may go a little light on the content this Holiday season. Although, I’ll still be publishing plenty during the holidays. The funny thing is that this website was first created over a holiday break. Now on to my usual Sunday Twitter roundup.

This is a pretty interesting list of 15 Rock Health startup companies. It’s their second batch of startup companies in the healthcare space. I talked to one of the other health startup incubators (and I know some don’t like to be called incubators) who said that they got about 100 applications. I wonder how many applications Rock Health got before they narrowed it down to this 15.

There’s definitely a lot of interesting momentum happening in the health startup area. In fact, I’m working on something related to it that could be really interesting. More on that in the new year.

@schwartzbrown very true, I’m hopeful (even though I think we’re far from this) that #EHR‘s will help w/collaboration on this info #NHDD

I hadn’t really thought about the impact of hospitals buying up all the primary care physicians on interoperability of healthcare data. On face it seems to me that more sharing would happen since it is easier to share health data within the same company than between two different companies. However, these tweets make me think I need to do a little more thinking ont he subject.

Doctors are wondering why EMR software doesn’t have a lot of things. I’m not sure I have a good answer to why EMR products don’t have some of the things that Arjun Maini talks about. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on it.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

There’s been a ton of interesting news about investment in healthcare IT lately. Much of what I’m seeing is happening in the mobile health space. No doubt mobile health is a really exciting market right now and I think it’s also really exciting because the cost to develop a mobile health app these days is so low.

Here are some interesting investment groups, incubators, etc that are focusing on healthcare IT:Healthbox – A leading venture capital firm and incubator for startup companies launched Healthbox to focus exclusively on the healthcare industry. They offer $50,000 in seed capital, along with standard incubator services (office, mentor/leaders, etc) and are based out of Chicago. The program will culminate in an investor’s day (I might have to get Neil Versel to attend the investor’s day).

Rock Health – Another startup seed-accelerator program that offers $20,000 along with mentorship and office space for 5 months. It just started this month in San Francisco and has connections to a lot of the major players in healthcare.

Blueprint Health – A startup accelerator based in New York City. It provides $20,000 of seed capital along with mentorship and a work environment to be able to build your idea. They’re initially planning for 10 companies.

Startup Health – This isn’t an investment vehicle yet, but I could see it becoming one very quickly. It’s part of the Startup America Partnership and has some big names like Time Warner Chairman and CEO, Steve Krein, Esther Dyson, and the founders of Health 2.0 Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya.

I’m guessing that there are even more programs that I’m missing. I’d love to learn about others in the comments as well. Either way, it’s exciting to see all this investment happening in healthcare applications.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

You know on the weekends I love to through in a little round up of some interesting things said about healthcare IT, EMR and other topics on Twitter. Hopefully, they’ll educate, entertain and inform. If not, tomorrow’s another edition of Meaningful Use Monday.

T2: I used to read 4 newsletters, now I don't. I've chg'd to read tweets & blog post – so much more current. #hcsm

I’ve been talking about this quite a bit lately on this blog (see my post about social media EMR information). However, I love how the described their shift from newsletters to tweets and blog posts since they’re more current. I obviously agree. Although, if you subscribe to the EMR and HIPAA email you can enjoy the convenience of an email newsletter with the current info of a blog.

I saw this announcement a while ago. I’m really excited to see what Rock Health is able to do. They definitely have a number of big names. I wish that I was some way involved with them since I love their approach. Plus, I’m really excited to have my brother, David, participating with me on the Smart Phone Healthcare website I recently launched. Mobile healthcare is a really hot area of the market and I think together we’re going to bring some interesting perspectives to the mobile area of healthcare.

I usually hate PDF’s and a tweet in a blog post that leads to a PDF is probably even worse. Although, it has an interesting format for considering the multiple e-Prescribing incentive programs. Of course, if you’re a regular reader of the site, then you already have started ePrescribing right?

LOL! RT @WilIFerrell: Facebook is like jail, you sit around & waste time, you write on walls & you get poked by people you don't know.

A new startup seed-accelerator, Rock Health, wants to give you $20,000, no strings attached, along with mentorship and office space for five months, in order to turn your health-related startup or idea into a reality. Supported by some serious names (see below), Rock Health aims to catalyze software-based innovation in the health sector. They’re structured as a non-profit, and are opening doors to their first startup class this June.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2011 – Rock Health, a seed accelerator for interactive health, announces its new incubator program linking developers and entrepreneurs with the most innovative minds in health and technology.

The first five-month incubator program will commence in June 2011 in San Francisco, and aims to catalyze health app innovation, turning ideas into products and businesses. “We’re creating an environment where entrepreneurs and developers from other sectors can approach problems in health care in new, product-centric ways,” says Rock Health’s managing director, Halle Tecco.
Selected startups receive a $20,000 grant in addition to free office space, mentorship, and access to Rock Health’s medical experts and partners.

“Health care is the most important challenge facing our nation, yet patient care and healthy living do not yet exhibit the technological creativity found in social media, games and other verticals,” adds Rock Health’s medical director, Nate Gross. “Physicians are excited to work with our developers because they recognize that product design should not be an afterthought.”

Rock Health is building a diverse advisor and mentor community with experts from design, data science, gaming and health care IT. Rock Health’s advisory board includes Frank Moss, head of the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab, and Michael Abbott, VP of Engineering at Twitter. Startup mentors include Charles Huang, co-founder of GuitarHero, and Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe. A full list of advisors and mentors can be found at http://rockhealth.com/.

Applications to join Rock Health are open until May 13.

About Rock Health
Rock Health is a seed accelerator that challenges developers and entrepreneurs to address issues in health and wellness through consumer web and mobile technologies. Founded in 2011, it provides early stage funding and strategic support as well as mentorship and office space to new companies. The incubator is backed by Aberdare Ventures, Accel Partners, the California HealthCare Foundation, Fenwick & West, Microsoft HealthVault, Mohr Davidow Ventures, NEA, Nike, and Qualcomm and is in
partnership with the Mayo Clinic and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. For more information, or to apply, visit RockHealth.com.

Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to EMR and HIPAA for FREE!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information. We respect our readers' privacy.